here), you tend to see noticeable stretching at the bottom of the frame.
Now, such lens-distortion effects can sometimes be desirable; but if you
wish to avoid this, then the aim should be to keep the camera position as
near vertical as possible. For example, I sometimes like to use a wide-angle
lens to shoot portraits, because a moderate wide-angle view can give your
portraits a more intimate look. To avoid any noticeable foreshortening,
I keep the camera as vertical as possible. Going back to the waterfall scene
discussed here, one option would have been to find a lower viewpoint so
that I didn’t have to tilt the camera down so much.
Given that this would have entailed me dangling off the end of a
rope(!), and that I’m not particularly good with heights, Option B was to
fix this problem in Lightroom. As I show in the following steps, I was able
to use the Manual transform sliders to apply a perspective correction
adjustment that effectively straightened-up the shooting angle of the
camera. The result is a wide-angle view of the waterfall that’s as wide
as the untransformed original, yet doesn’t look too noticeably like it’s a
wide-angle photograph. [KelbyOne members can click here to download
a downsized DNG version of this image to follow along.]THE STEPS
STEP ONE: To start with, I went to
the Basic panel where I made a few
Tone adjustments. I applied a nega-
tive Exposure adjustment to reduce
the brightness, and also adjusted the
Highlights and Shadows sliders to bring
out more detail in the waterfall and the
shaded rocks below. In the Presence
section below, I added a small amount
of Texture and Clarity to emphasize the
detail in the midtones.STEP TWO: Next, I went to the Tone Curve
panel, where I applied the composite
channel tone curve adjustment shown
here (first icon next to Adjust). Notice
how I dragged the shadow tone range
split point slider (the slider on the left
below the histogram) as far to the left
as it would go. This allowed me to then
apply a strongly negative Shadows
slider adjustment that was restricted
to the darkest shadow tones only.
This tone curve shape essentially
applied a heavy contrast kick to the
shadows, but without affecting the
midtone-to-shadow tone regions.Before
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